PODCAST · arts
Life Stories
by Ron Hogan
Ron Hogan interviews memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir.
Episodes
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Life Stories #105: Glen David Gold
I first met Glen David Gold when he was on a reading tour for his second novel, Sunnyside, which happened to be the name of the neighborhood where I lived at the time; that wasn't the only reason we hit it off, but we did, and so I was excited when I found out he was publishing a memoir, I Will…
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Life Stories #104: Minna Zallman Proctor
I met with Minna Zallman Proctor a while back, shortly after the publication of Landslide, a collection of autobiographical essays that orbit around her relationship with her mother. One of the things we discussed was how circumspect she was in the portrayal of her own children, and that prompted...
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Life Stories #103: Michelle Stevens
I first met Michelle Stevens in 2014, back when I was an acquiring editor for a startup book publishing company. We took a meeting with her and her agent after reading the proposal for her book, which combined a memoir about surviving childhood sexual abuse with solid explanations of the…
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Life Stories #102: Elizabeth W. Garber
I spoke with Elizabeth W. Garber the Monday right after Father's Day, an apt time to be discussing her memoir, Implosion. It's a story about growing up in Cincinnati in the 1960s and early '70s in a glass house designed by her architect father—years that were so unsettling to live through that…
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Life Stories #101: David Hallberg
I met David Hallberg at the midtown offices of the American Ballet Theater, where they'd set aside a conference room for us to talk about his new memoir, A Body of Work. It's about his relentless quest for perfection, from his earliest days as a ballet student in Arizona to his role as a…
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Life Stories #100: Kat Kinsman & Andrea Petersen
For the 100th episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I've been talking to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I wanted to do something special. So, in the spring of 2017, I sat down with Kat Kinsman, the author of Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves, and...
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Life Stories #99: Lauren Marks
Lauren Marks was an actress in her late twenties when she went to Edinburgh in 2007 to direct a friend's play in the city's annual Fringe Festival. One night, they went out to a bar, and she was in the midst of a karaoke number when an aneurysm in her brain burst. When she regained consciousness,...
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Life Stories #98: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
When Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was in law school, she did a summer internship at a Louisiana law firm. She was firmly against the death penalty, and then they asked if she would be prepared to work on the case of convicted child murderer Ricky Langley. Attempting to familiarize herself with…
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Life Stories #97: Andrew Forsthoefel
As I was talking with Andrew Forsthoefel in the spring of 2017 about his 4,000-mile walk across the United States, which he writes about in Walking to Listen, I asked a kidding-but-not-kidding question: "So, what were you walking away from?" Because you don't set off on foot to talk to random...
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Life Stories #96: James Rhodes
In the early months of 2017, I met the British concert pianist James Rhodes, who had come to the United States to discuss Instrumental, "a memoir of madness, medication, and music" as the subtitle puts it. Rhodes has a fascinating personal story: He'd played the piano some in his adolescence…
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Life Stories #95: Lauren Collins
Back in 2016, I had a fantastic conversation with Lauren Collins, a staff writer with The New Yorker who had just published When in French: Love in a Second Language, which is simultaneously a personal story about how Collins fell in love with a French man without really knowing the language—he...
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Life Stories #94: Okey Ndibe
When Okey Ndibe came to America at the end of 1988 at the invitation of fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe to edit a magazine about African culture, nobody thought to tell him about winter. He'd read about winter in American novels, of course, but he just assumed it would be like the annual cold snap…
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Life Stories #93: James Rebanks
Like many people, I first became aware of James Rebanks through his Herdwick Shepherd Twitter feed, where he posts pictures of his flock and talks about life as a farmer in England's Lake District. When he came to the United States for the first time in the fall of 2016 to promote his two books,...
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Life Stories #92: Thomas Dolby
As I mention at the beginning of this episode, my inner 13-year-old was thrilled at the opportunity to talk to Thomas Dolby about his memoir, The Speed of Sound, because I’d been a big fan of “She Blinded Me with Science†and the album it came off of, The Golden Age of Wireless, for over...
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Life Stories #91: Danielle Trussoni
I spoke to Danielle Trussoni about her second memoir, The Fortress, in late 2016, just a few days after the news had broken about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage falling apart. The timing was apt, given that Trussoni's book detailed how, in a desperate bid to save her own marriage, she…
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Life Stories #90: Barbara Schoichet
Barbara Schoichet got hit with a triple whammy just before her fiftieth birthday—she lost her job at a movie studio in Los Angeles, her girlfriend left her, and then her mother died. Don't Think Twice is the story of how she pushed back against all that by learning to ride a motorcycle, then...
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Life Stories #89: Jamie Brickhouse
I've known Jamie Brickhouse for a long time; in his former life as a book publicist, he was someone to whom I'd frequently reach out when I wanted to talk to... well, people like him in his current life as the author of Dangerous When Wet, "a memoir of booze, sex, and my mother," as the subtitle...
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Life Stories #88: John Kaag
I spoke to John Kaag about his memoir, American Philosophy, shortly after the 2016 presidential election, so although we did spend a fair amount of time talking about his personal story, and how a rare book collection tucked away in an old building in the woods of New Hampshire helped Kaag make…
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Life Stories #87: Barry Yourgrau
Barry Yourgrau actually lives just around the corner from me in Queens, so it was absurdly easy for us to get together to chat about his memoir, Mess—and the fact that this episode was recorded in my kitchen explains the occasional traffic noises from outside the second-floor window. Anyway, we...
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Life Stories #86: Matteson Perry
After Matteson Perry broke up with his "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," he realized that he'd never really NOT been in a serious relationship since high school, and decided it was time to get casual. Available recounts his adventures, and over the course of our conversation he explained what he learned...
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Life Stories #85: Kim Addonizio
I didn't realize until well into my conversation with Kim Addonizio that she'd written (but never published) a full-length memoir, a straightforward narrative about the breakup of a longterm relationship, before Bukowski in a Sundress, the collection of autobiographical essays that we'd met to...
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Life Stories #84: Emily Winslow
In the winter of 1992, Emily Winslow was a young theater major getting ready for her next semester when she was followed into her building by a stranger who then forced his way into her apartment and raped her. Over the years, she had kept in touch with the sex crimes unit of the Pittsburgh…
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Life Stories #83: Val Wang
In her memoir, Beijing Bastard, Val Wang writes about growing up as a Chinese-American and then moving to Beijing in the late 1990s: "I think a lot of people think I was looking for my roots; that's a popular storyline for a Chinese-American. But it was really the opposite for me. I was really...
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Life Stories #82: Maria Venegas
When Maria Venegas was a young girl growing up in Chicago, her father killed a neighbor and in the process of evading the police abandoned her and the rest of her family. It would be 14 years before she saw him again, and in the process of reconnecting with him she tried to get at the truth not...
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Life Stories #81: Nicole C. Kear
Nicole Kear was 19 when she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that, at the time it was discovered, was chipping away at her peripheral and night vision and would, she was told, result in more and more loss of vision over the years. Your life is going to change...
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Life Stories #80: Ava Chin
As a New York Times columnist, Ava Chin spent several years writing about her experiences foraging for edible plant life within the city limits. But Eating Wildly isn't just a handbook on how to find mulberries, (safe) mushrooms or other potential foodstuffs in an urban environment. It's also a...
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Life Stories #79: Molly Wizenberg
When Molly Wizenberg's husband told her that he wanted to open a New York-style pizzeria in Seattle, she encouraged him--even though she wasn't convinced it would ever happen. But as his plans got further along, she found herself taking on a bigger and bigger role in the restaurant's launch, as…
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Life Stories #78: Jen Doll
Jen Doll's been to a lot of weddings. Some of them have been great experiences, others not so much. She tells both kinds of stories in her memoir Save the Date... and, along the way, she has a lot to say about friendships, relationships, and making our way into adulthood. (And, over the course of...
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Life Stories #77: Elaine Lui
Some people will read Listen to the Squawking Chicken and decide that Elaine Lui's mother is not just emotionally manipulative but outright abusive, but Lui has a nuanced perspective on her upbringing and her mother's insistence of filial piety. Sure, she's not happy about how often her mother...
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Life Stories #76: Kelly Cogswell
Kelly Cogswell went to the first meeting of the Lesbian Avengers in 1992 because she wanted to be able to embrace her lesbian identity more confidently. She wound up playing a role in many of that group's direct action campaigns, but also bore witness to the internal conflicts that derailed the...
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Life Stories #75: Rayya Elias
Rayya Elias was born in Syria, then came to Detroit with her family just in time for the riots of the late '60s. As a young adult, she got involved in the local punk scene, then escaped to New York City to start her life over. Harley Loco takes readers back to a time when downtown Manhattan was a...
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Life Stories #74: Damian Barr
Damian Barr grew up in a small town in Scotland in the 1980s that was hit hard by the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. As his family struggled with the economic hardships affecting the community, and he endured emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather,...
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Life Stories #73: Annabelle Gurwitch
I've known Annabelle Gurwitch for years, and one of the things I've always loved about her writing is the ways she's able to find things in her personal experience that we can all identify with, and I See You Made an Effort is no exception. It's a collection of essays about life at "the edge of…
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Life Stories #72: Ophira Eisenberg
Ophira Eisenberg wasn't interested in long-term relationships, and had taken up a casual approach to dating and sex as a young adult. Then she met a man who wanted more than just a fling. Screw Everyone is the story of how she made the transition from a pragmatic "not choosy" approach to dating…
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Life Stories #71: Katherine Bouton
Katherine Bouton first began experiencing hearing loss in one ear at age 30, and spent years trying to work around the problem without really addressing it. That, she discovered, only made her life more frustrating. Shouting Won't Help is the story of how she came to face her condition head-on,...
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Life Stories #70: Julia Angwin
As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, Julia Angwin has spent several years addressing the surveillance of our online activities. Dragnet Nation is the story of how she set out to erase as much of her digital footprint as possible--not, she explains early on, to make it...
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Life Stories #69: Misty Copeland
When Misty Copeland was growing up, she wanted to be a gymnast, and then she joined her middle school's drill team. She was eventually steered towards ballet classes, and it turned out she had an uncanny ability to learn and replicate complex moves. Eventually, that got her out of Southern...
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Life Stories #68: Megan Hustad
When Megan Hustad was a young girl in the 1970s, her parents took her and her older sister with them to Bonaire, a small island in the Caribbean, where they'd decided to become missionaries with a evangelical Christian radio station. In More Than Conquerors, Megan talks about her years there…
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Life Stories #67: Arlo Crawford
Subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes photo: Kristen Fortier In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talking with Arlo Crawford about A Farm Dies Once a Year, the story of how he quit his job at 31 and […]
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Life Stories #66: Kelly Corrigan
After graduating from college in the early '90s, Kelly Corrigan couldn't wait to get out of her family's house and make some adventures for herself on the other side of the world. But when her funds ran low in Australia, she ended up taking a job as a nanny to a widower and his children -- a...
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Life Stories #65: Su Meck
In 1988, Su Meck was hit in the head by a low-hanging ceiling fan, further hitting her head on the kitchen counter as she collapsed to the floor. She experienced a traumatic brain injury that completely erased her memories of the first twenty-some years of her life. I Forgot to Remember is the...
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Life Stories #64: Janet Mock
When she was a child, everybody had a firm idea about who Janet Mock was--and their idea didn't include womanhood. In Redefining Realness, Mock talks about what it took to become the woman she knew herself to be, overcoming a childhood of poverty, sexual abuse, and drug-addicted parents, through...
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Life Stories #63: Leah Vincent
Leah Vincent grew up in an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism that keeps women in strictly regimented subservient roles, impressing upon them from the early age the importance of modesty. Her family essentially wrote her off as a lost cause because she had exchanged letters with a boy, abandoning her...
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Life Stories #62: Rebecca Mead
Rebecca Mead first read George Eliot's Middlemarch as a teenager in England, and she's returned to the novel about every five years or since -- and what she discovers in her reading is much different now than it was then. My Life in Middlemarch discusses how her attitudes towards the story's...
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Life Stories #61: David Stuart MacLean
In 2002, David Stuart MacLean snapped into consciousness on a train platform in India -- but he didn't know that at the time. He had no idea where he was... or who he was. He was told he was having a bad drug trip, and he believed it; the truth was that an anti-malarial medication called Lariam…
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Life Stories #60: Scott Stossel
Scott Stossel has been plagued by anxiety since early childhood--for more than a quarter-century, he's tried just about every therapeutic technique, every new medication. In My Age of Anxiety, he writes with candor about the effect anxiety disorder has had on his life... but he also opens the…
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Life Stories #59: Katie Heaney
Katie Heaney is in her late twenties and she's never been on a date, let alone had a romantic relationship. In Never Have I Ever, she looks back at her history of awkwardness around the opposite sex... and, in this interview, she talks about why she's not just okay with being single, she's gotten...
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Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart and his family came to New York City from the Soviet Union when he was a young boy, but their parenting style remained, as he describes it, distinctly Russian. Little Failure isn't just the title of his memoir; it's his mother's actual nickname for him in his 20s--a step up or…
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Life Stories #57: Jonathan Wilson
Jonathan Wilson's Kick and Run is a "memoir with soccer ball" that encompasses (among other things) life as a young Jewish boy in 1950s and 1960s London, as a journalist crossing the United States to cover the '94 World Cup for the New Yorker, and as an 50-something man realizing it might be time...
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Life Stories #56: Beth Lisick
Beth Lisick decided she was done writing autobiographical essays--but as she started work on her novel, she realized she still had a number of personal stories, stories that didn't necessary fit into larger literary concepts, but that she still wanted to tell. Focusing on "cringe-worthy" moments…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Life Stories have?
Life Stories currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Life Stories about?
Ron Hogan interviews memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir.
How often does Life Stories release new episodes?
Life Stories has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Life Stories?
You can listen to Life Stories on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Life Stories?
Life Stories is created and hosted by Ron Hogan.
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